To the west, near Beverly Regional Airport water enters the lake through deeply cut ravines in glacial features forested with hemlock and pine.

The Agwam people recognised tribal ownership of the eastern part of what is now Essex County, Massachusetts.

Those lands were ceded to the English in a quitclaim deed made by Chief Masconomet to John Winthrop the Younger.

The deed was part of an amalgamation arrangement between remaining Agawam (whose numbers had markedly declined in the 1600s due to disease) and the English colonists of Charlestown, Massachusetts.

[2] In 1638, Hugh Peters, the Puritan minister of the First Church of Salem, delivered a sermon to a small group of settlers on the shore of Wenham Lake.

In 1846, Benjamin Barker wrote Mornilva, or the outlaw of the forest: a romance of Lake Wenham.

[6] In the early colonial times, alewife fishing was an important part of the local economy of Wenham.

Alewife harvests continued to be important until the 19th century when dam construction on the Ipswich River and other streams ended the trade.

He became a Major General in the Union Army and a central figure in the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869.

Then, a horse-drawn cutting tool, the marker, scored a grid 2-3 inches deep forming 21-inch squares over two to three acres of ice.

An ice house was built of pine walls filled with sawdust to a thickness of 2 feet (61 cm).

The blocks were packed in sawdust for transport, moved to a train in a special wagon and brought directly to a wharf in Boston.

The dump was an abandoned gravel and sand quarry that had illegally stored refuse from coal burned at the Salem Harbor Power Generating Station.